FeynML home page

FeynML is a project to develop an XML dialect for describing Feynman diagrams as used
in quantum field theory calculations. The primary aim is to unambiguously describe the
structure of a diagram in XML, giving a de facto representation for diagram structure
which can be easily translated into another representation. Forseeable uses include:

Integration with MathML for labelling or specifying algebraic contributions of each part

Why XML?

Okay, XML is a bit of a buzzword. Not everything is best-represented as XML. However, it
does have several benefits: it is simple to read and write, both for humans and computers;
there are a variety of technologies available for parsing, styling and transforming XML (see
e.g. SAX, DOM, CSS, XSLT) and its heirarchical structure maps fairly well into describing
graphs. The variety of technologies aspect is probably the most important.

What do we propose?

The aim should be that the core XML is very semantic: diagrams simultaneously represent a
graph structure, a mathematical relationship and a pictorial representation. The XML
structure should reflect the graph structure, with algebraic and presentation information
being supplementary. An obvious way to achieve this would be with CSS styles for the presentation
and (perhaps) XPath references to MathML elements.

What's the status and plan?

FeynML is currently still in the draft stages. The proposed draft schema can be found
here. Files conforming to this schema can be used as input to
pyfeyn (e.g. via the mkfeyndiag script, which was used to create the diagram seen above).
Diagrams drawn with pyfeyn can also be written out as
FeynML.
As the pyfeyn developer, my main motivation is to make a graphical description
possible without programming, but I'm aware that a great deal would be possible via the
MathML side: anyone who's interested in that aspect should definitely contact me!